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KotNR: Planet Anno
=The Planet Anno= Background and history A world in the Kornacht Cluster, Anno is a bare hundred light years from Coruscant, located roughly along the Corellian Run if viewing the galaxy as a top-down projection, but so greatly diverged from the Run ‘vertically’ that it has never been a major stopover. Nevertheless, it was a lush garden world, and for millennia it was a happily habitable world, far enough off the beaten path that one could venture out of the cities and find verdant green growing lands, but close enough to find cities, with industries, businesses, and people. It all came to a crashing halt about a hundred and fifty years before the Battle of Yavin. Hundreds of years of polluting industry and poor regulation took their toll on Anno, as they have to so many other worlds. Unlike many other worlds, however, Anno seemed to fight back with a vengeance; a rise in global temperatures and the unfortunate decision to locate planetary infrastructure with massive power plants and inadequate shielding in the polar regions led to rapid polar ice melting, and the ocean quickly covered the world, raising sea levels so dramatically and in such a short time that the planet seemed to drown. Where once had been a planet of continents and seas was now an ocean world of archipelagos with only a few huge islands remaining worthy of the name. As ecological disasters went, it was hardly one of the greatest ever to befall an inhabited planet, but it was pretty bad. Billions of sapients had less than a month to evacuate their homes before the rising floodwaters claimed them, and most left for good. Hundreds of thousands still stayed, however, and a slow migration of immigrants looking for an oceanic world, a challenge, or an environmental cause continued to bolster their ranks. The Ithorians promised their help, but because Anno was still a livable, fertile planet, albeit one undergoing massive ecological upheavals, they didn’t send in a herdship, limiting their support. Years came and went, the planet continued to revolve, largely forgotten about by the galaxy at large as the locals and the sorts who were attracted to the place continued on. Eventually, three distinct camps emerged; Harmonizers, who were of the opinion that the best way for sapients to live was in complete harmony with nature, using technology and verdant skill to create living places and industries with a minimum of ecological impact, Researchers who grew largely to be agnostic towards the matter of the environmental state as long as they could continue to plumb the mysteries of science and technology, and Magnates, largely capitalist folk who did not give a damn about the environment as long as it wasn’t so bad that it was interfering with their businesses and industries. For almost a hundred years things went on well, with the oceans - which were by now so dilute that they were fresh water - populated by streaming hordes of fish gleefully swimming in and above drowned, sunken ruins, and the locals taking to the waves just as readily. When the Clone Wars hit, the Republic installed an orbiting supply and repair yard above the little-known planet. This upset most of the locals; Harmonizers because the Republic wasn’t shy about just dropping their waste into the ocean, Researchers because they feared governmental oversight and pilfering of their research and crackdowns on what they could research, and Magnates because the Republic didn’t want to do business with them on their terms, and brought in outside laborers and set up their own supply lines. The Republic did little to address these concerns, and when the Confederacy broke up and the Clone Wars officially came to an end, the locals invited the Galactic Empire to kindly remove their superfluous operations from their planet. The Galactic Empire instead expanded the repair yard to a small shipyard and installed garrisons. The locals of Anno did not like this. They had, after all, spend the last century and a quarter building themselves up as tough, do-it-ourselves types who had little use for the Galactic Empire’s oversight and control, but they had a problem; so deep in the Empire, yet so far out of the way, they were a very minor blip on the Alliance’s radar. Certainly, some locals escaped to join the Rebellion, and the Alliance did manage to funnel some intelligence and a few specialists to the locals, but for the most part, the people of Anno seemed willing to live with the yoke, and the Empire willing to let them live with the yoke. This is primarily because the Empire concerned itself almost exclusively with the matters happening above the waves. The locals bided their time, building up their strength, literally under the noses of the Empire; the Empire had done a poor job of securing the planet’s surface, let alone its subsurface, and given the strong naval presence in orbit, what would it have mattered? After all, they had denied even repulsorcraft vessels to the locals, what good would a ship, let alone a submarine, be against the Empire? As it turned out, far more good than they would have ever imagined. Following the fall of Coruscant, when Imperial vessels fleeing the fall looked for a safe harbor, Anno was the first one many of them who looked to the star charts in search of an Imperial facility that wasn’t under Alliance control found. Dozens of Imperial capital ships, Star Destroyers included, fled to Anno’s shipyards in various states of repair for safe-haven. The orbits were crowded, and every sensor array was aimed up and away from the planet, fearful of a Rebel follow-through, when it should have been aimed down. The locals of Anno, disparate in worldview but united in cause, had spent the entirety of the Empire’s control of their world building up for this opportunity. With the Rebel Alliance still seemingly so far away, but the Empire so broken, they had the opportunity they needed. In a coordinated assault the Empire never saw coming, sub-surface launched strategic missiles ripped from beneath the waves, igniting massive, powerful ion engines and activating shield generators, accelerating into orbit en masse. Before the Empire knew what was happening, the locals had violated hundreds of millennia worth of the customs of warfare on them, deploying atomic weapons of mass destruction not as single coups, but in abundance. Atomic fire lit the skies, and even undamaged, fully-shielded Imperial-II class Star Destroyers were rendered into burning wrecks by the assault. The shipyard, a dozen Star Destroyers and dozens of lesser capital ships were completely obliterated, leaving the island-based garrisons cut off. That was when the second prong of the attack came, when armed, well-designed military submarines with deck-mounted laser cannon turrets surfaced, raised shields, and began bombarding the Empire’s garrisons and surface repulsorcraft. Though the garrison’s fighter compliments tried, a handful of TIEs weren’t enough, and even if they did achieve air superiority, the submarines could simply escape beneath the waves to repair and return. By the time the nascent New Republic got around to checking Anno for the fleets they suspected had escaped and were possibly repairing, rearming, and massing for a counterattack there, they found that the locals had erased the Empire from their own world, without any help from you. In turn, even the veteran Rebels were unnerved by the extreme measures the local resistance had gone to; even though the atomic detonations had been sufficiently removed from the atmosphere as not to wreck the planet, strategic scale atomic weapons were still beyond the pale, things that even the Empire was reluctant (though not completely unwilling) to employ; on the scale the locals had used them, they were nigh-unthinkable. Many years later, the inhabitants of Anno are wary members of the New Republic. The locals still hold it to be both a point of pride and of contention that they rid themselves of the Empire without a single drop of blood being shed by a member of the Rebel Alliance to liberate their world, while the New Republic has thusfar failed to convince the locals to disarm themselves - normally not a problem for the New Republic, but the locals are still holding onto the atomic weapons they manufactured and had waiting in store for an Imperial counter-attack, giving rise to the very real worry that if something were to go monumentally wrong, the entire planet could end up a radioactive wasteland. On the other hand, it’s very, very hard to convince someone to willingly relinquish weapons that demolished the Empire, and for now everyone simply wishes to keep it as quiet as can be, for fear that other worlds might decide to begin manufacturing the ridiculously-easy-to-make weapons. The Power Players Amalgamated Oceans Trust Amalgamated Oceans Trust (AOT corp) is the largest ‘Magnate’ corp on Anno, and emblematic of ‘Magnates’ in general. Their concern is the bottom line and nothing else; keeping their employees well-fed and reasonably content is only a factor inasmuch as disgruntled, hungry employees leads to more disruptions and a worse profit margin than contented, well-fed employees, and keeping the ecological balance of their islands is only a concern inasmuch as scarred-up, polluted landscapes lead to poor crop harvests and health problems for their workers, which is to say, they only bother on the islands where massed populations live and where crops are grown. AOT (Which is referred to as Oceans Trust in most cases, or simply ‘The Company’) grew out of the Anno branch of the Intergalactic Banking Clan. When the ecological disaster on Anno hit, the Banking Clans promptly sold off what they felt were toxic assets at firesale prices, mostly to the on-planet executives, resulting large in the same faces running the same operations, just with a new logo out front. Today they are a worldwide consortium with significant offworld interests. They have diversified into a global-scale megacorporation from their financial roots, and operate everything from financial centers to energy production to heavy industry to retail sales to housing development, and have a stake in most profit-first organizations on Anno, ranging from controlling a wholly-owned subsidiary to simply lending startup finances to new independent operations. Ashilik Teyl, CEO Ultimate power in AOT is vested in the board of shareholders, but more immediate decisions (subject to review at shareholders’ meetings) are debated by the board of directors, elected by the Shareholders. Critical decisions and other executive power is vested in the personage of the long-serving Chief Executive Ashilik Teyl, a hard-hitting, no-nonsense grand dame of a Togruta. She was the personal assistant of the Imperially-installed CEO of Oceans Trust when the Empire was still on the planet, and it was not only her job to ensure the company ran smoothly so he didn’t have to raise his fat fingers to do any actual work, but also to insulate him and all the other Imperial stooges in the company from the off-the-books support and undersea work they were conducting in support of the homegrown rebellion. After the battle of Coruscant, when the Imperial warships were arriving for repairs, she dutifully presented the CEO and his Imperial cronies with a situation report on the fall of coruscant, an update on the incoming vessels and the projected impacts on Oceans Trust, the potential profit the company could make from exploiting the situation, and then added that there was one more line item the board needed to go over: the immediate lethal termination of employment of all Imperially-installed executives, officials and employees, pursuant to Oceans Trust’s support of and participation in the violent expulsion of the Galactic Empire from the planet Anno. Ashilik then produced a heavy blaster pistol and gunned them all down. It is believed that Ashilik Teyl’s assassination of the Imperially-installed board of directors of AOT were the first shots fired in the expulsion of the Empire. Either way, the next morning, when more than 90% of the planet and 100% of its orbit and solar system was under local control, Ashilik Teyl called an emergency shareholders meeting to outline the situation and explain the necessity of electing an interim CEO pursuant to the imminent reorganization of the company. She was immediately nominated, ran unopposed, and unanimously elected without abstaining votes whilst sitting behind the desk of a man who hadn’t yet reached room temperature; she hasn’t been dethroned since. Rauf Throne, Exigent Circumstances Rectification Manager A Human male in his late 40s to mid-50s, Rauf has always been a power-broker and a liaison, the man you comm when something needs to be done now. During the expulsion of the Empire, his official position - ECRM - was something of a smoke-screen. Ostensibly, the Exigent Circumstances Rectification Manager was an executive post with no permanent, set responsibilities or duties; rather, the job was that of a crisis coordinator and handler. In fact, his duties were to diffuse the costs of off-the-books operations into the day-to-day expenses of the company, handle employees who learned too much, and most importantly, arrange industrial accidents for Imperial stooges who were starting to wise up and investigate where they shouldn’t have been. These days, Rauf’s job ostensibly does not involve arranging discrete murders, but he still remains a floating executive, both literally and figuratively. He can deploy anywhere in the world in a matter of hours to represent the Company, whether in mitigating a disaster, correcting a wayward operation that needs to be running smooth or else, or, most importantly, managing tensions between Oceans Trust and other powers. As such, he is authorized by the Company to unilaterally undertake negotiations or violent corrections as he deems necessary. Rauf is never seen without an immaculately-cut business suit, wearing a wide variety of neck-ties; his hair is going gray at the temples and is otherwise the color of steel, as are the eyes set in his hard, weathered face. Harmony Initiative The Harmony Initiative is both the largest organization on Anno and the catch-all ‘big tent’ to whose banner all those interested primarily in protecting and restoring Anno’s environment flock. The Harmony Initiative is well-aware that it was unrestricted, unrestrained, and unregulated exploitation of Anno’s resources without heed to local or global environmental factors that led to the flooding of the world the first time, and it won’t let anyone, especially Oceans Trust, forget about it. The Initiative formed almost immediately after the global meltdown as an emergency relief organization, and slowly morphed into the Harmony Initiative known today, whose primary focus is on promoting the knowledge and practice of sapient beings living a high quality of life and in doing so in full harmony with growing, natural things. They frequently come into conflict with Oceans Trust over this, and while Oceans Trust frequently paints the Initiative as ecological terrorists writ large and anti-capitalist crusaders, the Harmony Initiative frequently paints the Company with the brush of environmental rapists and as being only marginally better than the Empire. While the truth is, as always, more complex than he-said she-said, the Initiative often has to juggle maintaining peaceful relationships on the planet with the fervor of many of its members who feel that the Trust is getting away with planetary murder, just as in the old days. Nevertheless, the Harmony Initiative is in possession of and freely disseminate knowledge and expertise. Their metropoli are gleaming edifices of white and clear and crystal, with trees and lush vegetation growing within. As a whole, the Initiative understands that sapient beings want to live in comfort, convenience and luxury, and while they usually won’t shy away from working hard to achieve the dream, they expect it to pay off in the end. Under Initiative guidance, it usually does, especially since the Initiative, thanks to its long life and its ability to subtly insert its agenda into the education it provides for the younglings raised under its banner, can ensure that great environmental conditions are considered by its citizenry to be part of their quality of life demands. Liam Blue The ‘Old Man’ of the Harmony Initiative, Liam is descended directly from the Initiative’s founder. When the Empire came and started to take over and insert their stooges into the upper levels of the largest organizations on Anno, Liam took the drastic step of faking his death in a tragic accident in a farming compound on one of the Initiative’s islands. In reality, he survived, assuming the role of one of the farmers who was there and was badly injured, being rushed off to receive reconstructive surgery. Following this, he slipped into the role he had assumed, and somehow wound up working his way up the ranks from a baseline worker to an Initiative executive by the time the expulsion of the Empire was at hand. As the expulsion got underway, it was Liam Blue who issued the public call to arms, his calm but firm voice revealing himself, naming himself, and calling upon all citizens of the planet Anno, whether Harmonizer, Magnate, Scientist, or just someone who didn’t want to live under the yoke of the Empire, to take up arms. He announced the destruction of the Imperial warships in orbit and the Empire’s patrol crafts on the surface, proclaiming the Imperial bases to be vulnerable, and Imperial patrols and garrisons trapped in cities and on islands not their own even moreso. Today, Liam is the public face and spiritual, economic and political leader of the Initiative, the guiding light that all Harmonizers look up to. He must carefully balance the Initiative between standing firm against Oceans Trust’s exploitative, environmentally-callous business plans and expansions, and not provoking an all-out war. Yara Gal Yara was only five years old when the Empire was expelled from Anno, and the young Twi’lek woman claims that the earliest memory she remembers is that of the night sky being filled with the light of day, followed by Liam Blue’s speech to the people of Anno. After that things became a blur of people running and screaming, blaster bolts filling the air. When things had settled down, her parents were missing and the young Twi’lek girl was adrift at sea, her lifeboat picked up by a passing Harmony freighter. Since then, Yara has proven herself to be a passionate ecologist with a flair for showwomanship and an adventurous spirit. These traits have quickly led her into the limelight, resulting in her being entrusted by Liam Blue as one of the public faces of the Initiative. The old man, who was himself rendered an orphan by the Empire, is someone Yara can readily contact for advice and suggestions, and he in turn considers her someone who can get things done. Center for the Organization of Research and Experimentation (C.O.R.E) As Anno’s ecological disaster loomed, the scientific community’s warnings of impending ecological disaster were ignored. C.O.R.E was formed to centralize the voices issuing the calls for caution, but even with examples of similar disasters on other worlds to draw upon, they were ignored until the disaster was well underway and ocean levels were rising at a rate people could see with their own eyes in real time. By then, it was far too late, and Anno’s scientific community rallied around C.O.R.E for another purpose: the preservation of the knowledge, research, databanks, and researchers that existed on Anno at the time. C.O.R.E succeeded at its new emergency goal, and emerged from the disaster in possession of one of the larger repositories of scientific knowledge in the galaxy. During the furor, scientists from dozens of disciplines flocked to C.O.R.E’s banner, ignoring previous affiliations and obligations to preserve the knowledge in their possession, resulting in C.O.R.E possessing a great deal of secret, copyright, proprietary, and otherwise off-limits research. Following the disaster, they decided that scientific knowledge and processes were things that should be entrusted to scientists, not corporations, governments, or NGOs, and hoarded what they had, rapidly expanding. Technically, their early actions were very, very illegal, but there were no longer any security forces on Anno capable of or willing to enforce the then-extant laws, and as part of the reorganization of the planetary power centers remaining large enough to form effective governing bodies into the World Council, C.O.R.E successfully made a bid to become one of the founding members of the Council on the basis that they had all the knowledge people would need to survive in the new world, and part of that deal was a complete pardoning of everything C.O.R.E had done up to that point. During the Imperial occupation of Anno, C.O.R.E was ostensibly placed under the supervision of Imperial officials. However, C.O.R.E had calculated the likelihood of such an outcome no matter who won the Clone Wars, and had already put plans into effect. The Imperial overseers took control and supervision of a pale shadow of C.O.R.E, the majority of the organization having vanished under the waves, leaving just enough left above the water to convince the Empire that C.O.R.E was just a backwater, primarily educational academy with pretensions of grandeur. It was during this period that C.O.R.E bore the brunt of the preparations to expel the Empire, applying their know-how to create and assemble weapon systems in secret, eventually assembling a large fleet of armed submarines in secret underwater docks the Empire knew nothing about, thanks to Oceans Trust’s industrial capability and the Harmonizer’s ability with ecological manipulation to conceal any signs of the work being done. Ultimately, C.O.R.E distributed a third of the weapons and weaponized vessels to the Initiative and a third to the Oceans Trust, and waited, and waited. When expulsion day came, their vindication came to pass. Today, C.O.R.E is the governing body behind scientific research on Anno, and, though not well-known offworld, is readily the equal of better-known academic institutes. What sets it apart is that CORE also wields political and economic power, though not usually directly. Most C.O.R.E settlements are in fact satellite settlements of Magnate or Harmonizer settlements which were sold the rights to install scientific housing, research, and development facilities and the rights to deploy any technologies assembled in said facilities in local practical operations, in exchange for CORE receiving all data gleaned from such operations. This, combined with the fact that no underwater construction can really take place without C.O.R.E’s assistance, ensures that they have a good flow of funding and independence from Amalgamated Oceans Trust and the Harmony Initiative. M0-M Referred to as ‘Mother’ or ‘Mom’ often enough to answer to the monikers, M0-M is a second-degree planning droid that was built by C.O.R.E in the waning days of the Republic as part of their plan to evacuate. She has been operating continuously since then. M0-M doesn’t really ‘control’ C.O.R.E as much as coordinate it, acting as a central hub for C.O.R.E’s research, communications, and debates. Her chassis is essentially immobile, a pivoting upper body of white metal gleaming with blue inside, rotating on an immobile pedestal that needs to be manually moved to another location should she need to be relocated. M0-M was designed cautiously, she is incapable of directly accessing data, meaning that no hostile code can be introduced into her externally. As a result, she requires a huge room full of display screens to display data to her, though she is capable of outputting commands autonomously. She was also designed with a very strong, strictly-mechanical fail-safe system capable of cutting off her ability to output commands if anyone in C.O.R.E believes she is malfunctioning, cutting off her power to force her into standby mode, or, should both of those measures fail, detonating her. Though her function was inspired by that of the G0-T0 series planning droids, M0-M was designed with an eye to past disasters. Professor Doctor Devin Salme Dr. Salme is an old human male, aged, learned, and ostensibly wise. He is the human spokesman for C.O.R.E and occasionally the leader of deep sea and deep ocean scientific expeditions, though his health is precluding much of that in recent years. He spent virtually the entire Imperial occupation literally underwater, coordinating the secret teams of researchers who researched and developed the atomic warheads and related delivery technology that enabled Anno’s population to expel the Empire from their homeworld. It was Doctor Salme who received the reports from the surfacers that determined that the Empire was hurting and on the ropes, who calculated that the time to strike was upon them, and who personally contacted Liam Blue and Ashilik Teyl to make the agreement to start the revolution. It was Devin Salme who coordinated the strike, synchronizing with submarines all around the planet, and transmitted the very definitely final launch order. It was on Doctor Salme’s command that the skies above Anno were scourged with atomic fireballs, transforming midnight to high noon and leaving only debris where once warships flew. Since that day, every day, Dr. Salme has questioned the measures they undertook, bucking millennia of both formal and informal rules of war, using weapons best associated with the ancient Mandalorians, on a distressingly wide scale. And worse, he worries that with the proliferation of atomic weapons, the planet is at risk of destruction. Dr. Salme frequently lectures these days, urging his students, colleagues, peers, and fellow citizens to consider carefully the ramifications of the strong measures they may be inclined to take. He has become very introspective since that day. Doctor Xori Tartok Doctor Xori is Professor Salme’s right-hand woman. A compact, relatively short Falleen woman with moderately soft features (for a Falleen,) she wears her short blue hair cropped close around her head at the jawline, with tinkling crystals tied to the ends of her hair. The story of how Xori came to be on Anno is a mystery, as she was found wandering the streets of C.O.R.E’s primary city as an extremely young girl a few years after the declaration of the New Order, with only hazy memories of her past. With nothing better to do with her, she was simply placed in foster care and assigned to schooling, which Doctor Xori took to quite well. She also took quite well to the expulsion of the Empire; when the night turned to day as atomic fire blossomed overhead, Xori was ready, despite having not been in any kind of contact with the rebellious forces, they having overlooked her. She had already inserted virus code into C.O.R.E’s security droids, hijacking control over them and turning them against the Empire. Not content with that measure, however, she quickly disconnected M0-M from the network so the overdroid couldn’t undo her handiwork, and took to the streets with an experimental heavy weapon strapped to her back that cut straight through the Imperial AT-STs and AT-MPs that were deployed at C.O.R.E: what it did to the Stormtroopers that got in her way is simply not something to mention in polite company, but which can best be likened in consistency to a number of forms of chunky dips eaten typically as a condiment upon hardened, fried slices of tuber or flour. Many years on from that auspicious day, Xori looks every bit the passionate young woman she was on that day, and is Dr. Salme’s most trusted assistant, as well as the woman he sends in his stead when his failing health prevents him from travelling as much as he would like. The Situation The locals of the planet Anno were reluctant to transmit the full details of their brewing conflict over the holonet to the Jedi Order, but in broad strokes it goes as thus: Oceans Trust alleges that one of their most expensive, critical deep-sea fissure mining installations went dark, and their first relief expedition fell out of contact before reporting anything. The second expedition (larger and more heavily-armed,) found only rubble, ruin and remain, the majority of the facility seeming to have been cast into the fissure. Shortly after this, a second facility, an underwater tidal power facility, went equally dark, and when they got there, they found again, barely scraps of what was there. The Harmony Initiative then alleges that shortly after the Company suffered their second alleged attack, one of their own facilities, an underwater recycling operation, was also attacked and leveled. The Council convened, and after furious deliberations, decided to request outside mediation. That's where the Jedi come in. Category:Knights of the New Republic